Mic Mann,co-CEO of SingularityU South Africa and co-organiser of the SingularityU South Africa Summit, talks to Siphumelele Zondi from SABC Network about how exponential technologies will help to future-proof Africa’s workforce.

Mic Mann,co-CEO of SingularityU South Africa and co-organiser of the SingularityU South Africa Summit, wrote an opinion article for The Star about how virtual reality is transforming the work space and the future of the professional. Exponential technologies, such as artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality as well as immersive computing are transforming the way in which we work and network across all industries.

For the first time, the Classic Business Breakfast and Moneyweb team conducted a radio interview while immersed in the virtual world. Watch the video below as Aaron Frank, principal faculty at Singularity University, and Mic Mann, director at Mic Mann and co-organiser of the SingularityU South Africa Summit, share developments and trends in the VR space.

Syndicated from singularityhub.com (Raya Bidshahri) with permission, edited by Mann Made Media.

We’ve all heard the warnings: automation will disrupt entire industries and put millions of people out of jobs. Up to 45 per cent of existing jobs can already be automated using current technology. However, this may not apply to the education sector. After analysing more than 2 000 work activities for more than 800 occupations, McKinsey & Co. reported that of all the sectors examined, “the technical feasibility of automation is lowest in education.”

There’s no doubt that technology will continue to have a powerful impact on global education, both by improving the learning experience and by increasing global access to education. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), chatbot tutors, and AI-powered lesson plans are a few examples of the digital transformation in global education. But will robots and artificial intelligence ever fully replace teachers?

The first-ever Singularity University South Africa Summit (23-24 August 2017) on the African continent aims to equip attendees with exponential knowledge and understanding about how to tackle the country’s and continent’s grand challenges, such as the lack of quality education, high unemployment rates, food security, disaster relief, governance to name a few, through practical and applicable teachings. Thought leaders and industry specialists from various sectors, such as education, healthcare, finance, and energy will present at this thought-provoking summit.

Sizwe Nxasana is the founder of Sifiso Learning Group, which is involved in Edtech and academic publishing, and also founded Future Nation Schools – a chain of affordable private schools in South Africa. He holds education in very high esteem and has a BCom, BCompt (Hons), CA (SA) qualifications and has also been conferred with honorary doctorates by the University of Fort Hare, the Durban University of Technology, the University of Johannesburg and the Walter Sisulu University. Nxasana is the co-founder and chairman of the National Education Collaboration Trust and was appointed chairman of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. He is also chairman of the Ministerial Task Team that’s developing a new funding model for students who come from poor and “missing middle” backgrounds. Nxasana understands the importance of education and its impact on individuals – especially women and children from disadvantaged backgrounds – the economy, and how it positively affects prosperity, future economic growth and social stability. All of which makes his more than qualified and experienced to speak about the future of education at the inaugural Singularity University South Africa Summit.

The Most Difficult Sector to Automate

While tasks revolving around education – like administration or facilities maintenance – are open to automation, teaching is not.

Effective education involves more than just the transfer of information from teacher to student. Good teaching requires complex social interactions and adaptation to each student’s learning needs and their cultural-social context. An effective teacher is not just responsive to each student’s strengths and weaknesses, but is also empathetic towards their state of mind. Teachers aim to maximise human potential. Vienne Ming, SU Faculty member of Cognitive Neuroscience, will be speaking on that very topic at the Summit in South Africa.

Students also rely on teachers for life guidance and career mentorship. Deep and meaningful human interaction is crucial, and very difficult, if not impossible, to automate. Automating teaching would require artificial general intelligence (as opposed to narrow or specific intelligence). It would require an AI that understands natural human language, can be empathetic towards emotions, plan, strategise and make impactful decisions under unpredictable circumstances. This would be the kind of machine that can do anything a human can do, and it doesn’t exist – yet.

Getting There

Jill Watson, a teaching assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology, is an IBM-powered artificial intelligence that’s being implemented in universities around the world. She is able to answer students’ questions with 97 per cent accuracy. Technologies like this also have applications in grading and providing feedback. Some AI algorithms are being refined to perform automatic essay scoring. One project has achieved a 0.945 correlation with human graders. This will have remarkable impacts on online education and will dramatically increase online student retention rates.
Any student with internet can access information and free courses (MOOCs) from universities around the world, but not all students can receive customised feedback due to the limit of manpower. Chatbots like Jill Watson allow the opportunity for students to have their work reviewed and all their questions answered at a minimal cost.

AI algorithms also have a significant role to play in the personalisation of education. Data analysis helps improves students’ results by assessing each student’s learning strengths and weaknesses and creating mass-customised programmes. Algorithms can analyse student data and create flexible programmes that adapt based on real-time feedback. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, all of this data could unlock up to $1.2 trillion in global economic value.

Beyond Automated Teaching

But technological automation alone won’t even begin to tackle the many issues in our global education system. Outdated curricula, standardised tests, and an emphasis on short-term knowledge, call for a transformation of how we teach. It’s not sufficient to automate the process. We must not only be innovative with our automation capabilities, but also with educational content, strategy and policies. And on the continent, there’s an even more pressing issue, the fact that many children don’t even have access or can’t afford quality teachers, school facilities and adequate learning materials in the first place. The lack of education is one of the most vital grand challenges that needs to be addressed in order to move Africa forward and to help realise the future of human potential.

To learn more about how disruptive and exponential technologies will transform your business, and revolutionise the education sector, book your tickets to the upcoming Singularity University South Africa Summit . SingularityU South Africa Summit in collaboration with Standard Bank, global partners Deloitte and strategic partners MTN and SAP, is produced by Mann Made Media and will take place on the 23-24 August 2017 at Kyalami Grand Prix and International Convention Centre.

There is nothing to be gained from blind optimism. But an optimistic mindset can be grounded in rationality and evidence. It may be hard to believe, but we are living in the most exciting time in human history. Despite all of our ongoing global challenges, humanity has never been better off. Not only are we living healthier, happier, and safer lives than ever before, but new technological tools are also opening up a universe of opportunities.

In order to continue to launch moonshot ideas, tackle global challenges, and push humanity forward, it’s important to be intelligently optimistic about the future.

Our Pessimism Bias

When we think about the future of our species, many of us are inherently pessimistic. Our brains are wired to pay more attention to the threats in our personal lives and our world at large.

Many studies have shown we react more strongly to negative stimuli than positive stimuli, and that we dedicate more of our brain resources to negative information. Some psychologists have also shown that we tend to give greater weight to negative thoughts when making decisions and that we tend to remember negative events in our lives more than positives.

There is an evolutionary advantage to these tendencies. We often forget that our neural hardware has been developed to survive the African savannah, where survival depended on being aware of constant sources of danger. But it may no longer serve its purpose in our modern world.

The media is partially to blame for adding fuel to the fire. In fact, studies show that bad news outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good one. News agencies know very well that we will pay more attention to bad news and hence, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Another team of psychologists from McGill revealed that people tend to choose to read articles with negative tones and respond much faster to headlines with negative words. You’re not constantly seeing negative headlines because the world is getting worse, you’re constantly seeing negative headlines because that’s what audiences react to.

Studies have shown that the public tends to pay most attention to news about war and terrorism and least about science and technology. Consequently, we have trained journalists and news channels to focus on those issues more than on our innovative breakthroughs. What does that say about us as a society?

A Need for Intelligent Optimism

Intelligent optimism is all about being excited about the future in an informed and rational way. The mindset is critical if we are to get everyone excited about the future by highlighting the rapid progress we have made and recognizing the tremendous potential humans have to find solutions to our problems.

Despite ongoing challenges, we have a lot to celebrate about how far we’ve come as a species. As optimists like Peter Diamandis point out, we are living in an era of abundance, and there’s a lot of evidence to prove it.

Let’s be very clear: being intelligently optimistic does not mean we turn our backs to the many global challenges we are faced with today. Our world is far from perfect. The refugee crisis, climate change, wealth inequality, and other global issues are significant and worthy of our attention.

But as physicist and futurist David Deutsch points out, “Problems exist; and problems are soluble with the right knowledge.” Intelligent optimism involves recognizing the many problems we are faced with and acknowledging that we can solve them just as we have overcome many other challenges in the past.

A Critical Mindset for Progress

We can’t let negative headlines and the media shape our perception of ourselves as a species, and the vision we have for the future. As legendary astronomer Carl Sagan said, “For all of our failings, despite our limitations and fallibility, we humans are capable of greatness.”

Hollywood likes to paint disproportionately dystopian visions of the world, and while those are possible futures, we can and must also imagine a future of humanity where we live in abundance, prosperity, and transcendence. We can’t expect current innovators and future generations to make this positive vision a reality if they believe our species is doomed for failure. It inspires us to continue to contribute to human progress and feel that we can push humanity forward.

It’s absolutely critical that our journalists cover the many challenges, threats, and issues in our world today. But just as we report the significant negative news in the world, we must also continue to highlight humanity’s accomplishments. After all, how can our youth grow up believing they can have a positive impact on the world if the news is suggesting otherwise?

In 47 CE, Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, described in his Compositiones a method for treating chronic migraines: place torpedo fish on the scalps of patients to ease their pain with electric shocks. Largus was on the right path; our brains are comprised of electrical signals that influence how brain cells communicate with each other and in turn affect cognitive processes such as memory, emotion and attention.

The science of brain stimulation—altering electrical signals in the brain—has, needless to say, changed in the past 2,000 years. Today we have a handful of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) devices that deliver constant, low current to specific regions of the brain through electrodes on the scalp, for users ranging from online video-gamers to professional athletes and people with depression. Yet cognitive neuroscientists are still working to understand just how much we can influence brain signals and improve cognition with these techniques.

Brain stimulation by tDCS is non-invasive and inexpensive. Some scientists think it increases the likelihood that neurons will fire, altering neural connections and potentially improving the cognitive skills associated with specific brain regions. Neural networks associated with attention control can be targeted to improve focus in people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Or people who have a hard time remembering shopping lists and phone numbers might like to target brain areas associated with short-term (also known as working) memory in order to enhance this cognitive process. However, the effects of tDCS are inconclusive across a wide body of peer-reviewed studies, particularly after a single session. In fact, some experts question whether enough electrical stimulation from the technique is passing through the scalp into the brain to alter connections between brain cells at all.

Notably, the neuroscientist György Buzsáki at New York University presented research conducted with cadavers, concluding that very little of the current administered through tDCS actually travels into the brain, perhaps under 10 percent. Other researchers report the opposite. Recent neuroimaging studieshave shown significant increases in neurotransmitter levels and bloodflow at the site of tDCS stimulation during a single session. Still, in response to growing concern, many researchers have begun to administer tDCS over a period of days for an additive effect. Studies have shown enhanced treatment effects (yet no increase in side effects) attributable to repeated sessions as opposed to a single session of tDCS.

Even more basic concerns about tDCS research need to be addressed; particularly, tDCS protocols are rather inconsistent between research labs. For example, one lab might administer tDCS for 20 minutes at the maximum voltage of 2 mA while another lab might administer tDCS for 25 minutes at 1 mA, and another still might administer for 15 minutes at 1.5 mA. Combining each of these studies into a literature review proves time-consuming and confusing. We do not know yet what the optimal time and voltage levels are for tDCS. Let’s say 1 mA is too low to initiate neural changes and improve cognitive abilities. Then handfuls of papers and years of research could turn out to be quite uninformative.

Lately, the technology has been combined with cognitive training to achieve long-term improvements. This is a natural progression of the work. It is thought that tDCS allows neurons to fire more readily. Then on top of that, just like working out a muscle, a cognitive training task is an exercise that will work out the neurons in brain regions heavily involved with employing that cognitive process (muscles). To take advantage of both of these techniques, shouldn’t we then encourage those neurons and brain regions to work even harder during tDCS by engaging the specific brain areas being targeted with a cognitive task? In fact, studies confirm this theory, and show that heightened performance and longer-lasting improvements result from the combination of cognitive training with tDCS.

In a several-year collaboration between the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab at the University of Michigan and the Working Memory and Plasticity Lab at the University of California at Irvine, we have been investigating working-memory training in conjunction with tDCS. During the training task, participants are asked to hold progressively more information in their working memory while simultaneously undergoing tDCS. Although the results are still limited and somewhat mixed, evidence suggests that the combination of brain stimulation and training is more effective in improving working memory than either technique alone. For the experimental tDCS group, better performance could be measured even a year after our sessions, an improvement not found with placebo controls. And our collaboration has even uncovered a nuance of combined working-memory training and tDCS: participants who began training with a lower baseline working memory improved more than those who began with a higher baseline performance.

Clearly there is much more work to do to understand tDCS and cognitive training. To create more consistency in the literature, researchers will need to investigate optimal parameters (such as time length and current intensity) for tDCS as a form of cognitive and therapeutic enhancement. A next step is to understand the underlying neural mechanisms of tDCS and cognitive training, which will require a multidisciplinary approach using neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI. This would then make it possible for researchers to visualize (1) activation of brain regions due to tDCS, (2) activation due to tDCS and a cognitive task, and even (3) changes in activation specifically due to combined tDCS and cognitive training over cognitive training alone.

I am cautiously optimistic about the promise of tDCS; cognitive training paired with tDCS specifically could lead to improvements in attention and memory for people of all ages and make some huge changes in society. Maybe we could help to stave off cognitive decline in older adults or enhance cognitive skills, such as focus, in people such as airline pilots or soldiers, who need it the most. Still, I am happy to report that we have at least moved on from torpedo fish.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

For some die-hard tech evangelists, using neural interfaces to merge with AI is the inevitable next step in humankind’s evolution. But a group of 27 neuroscientists, ethicists, and machine learning experts have highlighted the myriad ethical pitfalls that could be waiting.

To be clear, it’s not just futurologists banking on the convergence of these emerging technologies. The Morningside Group estimates that private spending on neurotechnology is in the region of $100 million a year and growing fast, while in the US alone public funding since 2013 has passed the $500 million mark.

The group is made up of representatives from international brain research projects, tech companies like Google and neural interface startup Kernel, and academics from the US, Canada, Europe, Israel, China, Japan, and Australia. They met in May to discuss the ethics of neurotechnologies and AI, and have now published their conclusions in the journal Nature.

While the authors concede it’s likely to be years or even decades before neural interfaces are used outside of limited medical contexts, they say we are headed towards a future where we can decode and manipulate people’s mental processes, communicate telepathically, and technologically augment human mental and physical capabilities.

“Such advances could revolutionize the treatment of many conditions…and transform human experience for the better,” they write. “But the technology could also exacerbate social inequalities and offer corporations, hackers, governments, or anyone else new ways to exploit and manipulate people. And it could profoundly alter some core human characteristics: private mental life, individual agency, and an understanding of individuals as entities bound by their bodies.”

The researchers identify four key areas of concern: privacy and consent, agency and identity, augmentation, and bias. The first and last topics are already mainstays of warnings about the dangers of unregulated and unconscientious use of machine learning, and the problems and solutions the authors highlight are well-worn.

On privacy, the concerns are much the same as those raised about the reams of personal data corporations and governments are already hoovering up. The added sensitivity of neural data makes the suggestion of an automatic opt-out for sharing of neural data and bans on individuals selling their data more feasible.

But other suggestions to use technological approaches to better protect data like “differential privacy,” “federated learning,” and blockchain are equally applicable to non-neural data. Similarly, the ability of machine learning algorithms to pick up bias inherent in training data is already a well-documented problem, and one with ramifications that go beyond just neurotechnology.

When it comes to identity, agency, and augmentation, though, the authors show how the convergence of AI and neurotechnology could result in entirely novel challenges that could test our assumptions about the nature of the self, personal responsibility, and what ties humans together as a species.

They ask the reader to imagine if machine learning algorithms combined with neural interfaces allowed a form of ‘auto-complete’ function that could fill the gap between intention and action, or if you could telepathically control devices at great distance or in collaboration with other minds. These are all realistic possibilities that could blur our understanding of who we are and what actions we can attribute as our own.

The authors suggest adding “neurorights” that protect identity and agency to international treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or possibly the creation of a new international convention on the technology. This isn’t an entirely new idea; in May, I reported on a proposal for four new human rights to protect people against neural implants being used to monitor their thoughts or interfere with or hijack their mental processes.

But these rights were designed primarily to protect against coercive exploitation of neurotechnology or the data it produces. The concerns around identity and agency are more philosophical, and it’s less clear that new rights would be an effective way to deal with them. While the examples the authors highlight could be forced upon someone, they sound more like something a person would willingly adopt, potentially waiving rights in return for enhanced capabilities.

The authors suggest these rights could enshrine a requirement to educate people about the possible cognitive and emotional side effects of neurotechnologies rather than the purely medical impacts. That’s a sensible suggestion, but ultimately people may have to make up their own minds about what they are willing to give up in return for new abilities.

This leads to the authors’ final area of concern—augmentation. As neurotechnology makes it possible for people to enhance their mental, physical, and sensory capacities, it is likely to raise concerns about equitable access, pressure to keep up, and the potential for discrimination against those who don’t. There’s also the danger that military applications could lead to an arms race.

“The temptation could be to simply ban the technology altogether, but the researchers warn that this could simply push it underground.”

The authors suggest that guidelines should be drawn up at both the national and international levels to set limits on augmentation in a similar way to those being drawn up to control gene editing in humans, but they admit that “any lines drawn will inevitably be blurry.” That’s because it’s hard to predict the impact these technologies will have and building international consensus will be hard because different cultures lend more weight to things like privacy and individuality than others.

The temptation could be to simply ban the technology altogether, but the researchers warn that this could simply push it underground. In the end, they conclude that it may come down to the developers of the technology to ensure it does more good than harm. Individual engineers can’t be expected to shoulder this burden alone, though.

“History indicates that profit hunting will often trump social responsibility in the corporate world,” the authors write. “And even if, at an individual level, most technologists set out to benefit humanity, they can come up against complex ethical dilemmas for which they aren’t prepared.”

For this reason, they say, industry and academia need to devise a code of conduct similar to the Hippocratic Oath doctors are required to take, and rigorous ethical training needs to become standard when joining a company or laboratory.

Artificial intelligence has received its fair share of hype recently. However, it’s hype that’s well-founded: IDC predicts worldwide spend on AI and cognitive computing will culminate to a whopping $46 billion (with a “b”) by 2020, and all the tech giants are jumping on board faster than you can say “ROI.” But what is AI, exactly?

According to Hilary Mason, AI today is being misused as a sort of catch-all term to basically describe “any system that uses data to do anything.” But it’s so much more than that. A truly artificially intelligent system is one that learns on its own, one that’s capable of crunching copious amounts of data in order to create associations and intelligently mimic actual human behavior.

It’s what powers the technology anticipating our next online purchase (Amazon), or the virtual assistant that deciphers our voice commands with incredible accuracy (Siri), or even the hipster-friendly recommendation enginethat helps you discover new music before your friends do (Pandora). But AI is moving past these consumer-pleasing “nice-to-haves” and getting down to serious business: saving our butts.

Much in the same way robotics entered manufacturing, AI is making its mark in healthcare by automating mundane, repetitive tasks. This is especially true in the case of detecting cancer. By leveraging the power of deep learning, algorithms can now be trained to distinguish between sets of pixels in an image that represents cancer versus sets that don’t—not unlike how Facebook’s image recognition software tags pictures of our friends without us having to type in their names first. This software can then go ahead and scour millions of medical images (MRIs, CT scans, etc.) in a single day to detect anomalies on a scope that humans just aren’t capable of. That’s huge.

As if that wasn’t enough, these algorithms are constantly learning and evolving, getting better at making these associations with each new data set that gets fed to them. Radiology, dermatology, and pathology will experience a giant upheaval as tech giants and startups alike jump in to bring these deep learning algorithms to a hospital near you.

In fact, some already are: the FDA recently gave their seal of approval for an AI-powered medical imaging platform that helps doctors analyze and diagnose heart anomalies. This is the first time the FDA has approved a machine learning application for use in a clinical setting.

But how efficient is AI compared to humans, really? Well, aside from the obvious fact that software programs don’t get bored or distracted or have to check Facebook every twenty minutes, AI is exponentially better than us at analyzing data.

Take, for example, IBM’s Watson. Watson analyzed genomic data from both tumor cells and healthy cells and was ultimately able to glean actionable insights in a mere 10 minutes. Compare that to the 160 hours it would have taken a human to analyze that same data. Diagnoses aside, AI is also being leveraged in pharmaceuticals to aid in the very time-consuming grunt work of discovering new drugs, and all the big players are getting involved.

But AI is far from being just a behind-the-scenes player. Gartner recently predicted that by 2025, 50 percent of the population will rely on AI-powered “virtual personal health assistants” for their routine primary care needs. What this means is that consumer-facing voice and chat-operated “assistants” (think Siri or Cortana) would, in effect, serve as a central hub of interaction for all our connected health devices and the algorithms crunching all our real-time biometric data. These assistants would keep us apprised of our current state of well-being, acting as a sort of digital facilitator for our personal health objectives and an always-on health alert system that would notify us when we actually need to see a physician.

Slowly, and thanks to the tsunami of data and advancements in self-learning algorithms, healthcare is transitioning from a reactive model to more of a preventative model—and it’s completely upending the way care is delivered. Whether Elon Musk’s dystopian outlook on AI holds any weight or not is yet to be determined. But one thing’s certain: for the time being, artificial intelligence is saving our lives.

The renowned physicist Dr. Richard Feynman once said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand. Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”

An increasingly influential subfield of neuroscience has taken Feynman’s words to heart. To theoretical neuroscientists, the key to understanding how intelligence works is to recreate it inside a computer. Neuron by neuron, these whizzes hope to reconstruct the neural processes that lead to a thought, a memory, or a feeling.

With a digital brain in place, scientists can test out current theories of cognition or explore the parameters that lead to a malfunctioning mind. As philosopher Dr. Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford argues, simulating the human mind is perhaps one of the most promising (if laborious) ways to recreate—and surpass—human-level ingenuity.

There’s just one problem: our computers can’t handle the massively parallel nature of our brains. Squished within a three-pound organ are over 100 billion interconnected neurons and trillions of synapses.

Even the most powerful supercomputers today balk at that scale: so far, machines such as the K computer at the Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan can tackle at most ten percent of neurons and their synapses in the cortex.

This ineptitude is partially due to software. As computational hardware inevitably gets faster, algorithms increasingly become the linchpin towards whole-brain simulation.

This month, an international team completely revamped the structure of a popular simulation algorithm, developing a powerful piece of technology that dramatically slashes computing time and memory use.

Using today’s simulation algorithms, only small progress (dark red area of center brain) would be possible on the next generation of supercomputers. However, the new technology allows researchers to simulate larger parts of the brain while using the same amount of computer memory. This makes the new technology more appropriate for future use in supercomputers for whole-brain level simulation. Image Credit: Forschungszentrum Jülich/Frontiers

The new algorithm is compatible with a range of computing hardware, from laptops to supercomputers. When future exascale supercomputers hit the scene—projected to be 10 to 100 times more powerful than today’s top performers—the algorithm can immediately run on those computing beasts.

“With the new technology we can exploit the increased parallelism of modern microprocessors a lot better than previously, which will become even more important in exascale computers,” said study author Jakob Jordan at the Jülich

Research Center in Germany, who published the work in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics.

The Trouble With Scale

Current supercomputers are composed of hundreds of thousands of subdomains called nodes. Each node has multiple processing centers that can support a handful of virtual neurons and their connections.

A main issue in brain simulation is how to effectively represent millions of neurons and their connections inside these processing centers to cut time and power.

One of the most popular simulation algorithms today is the Memory-Usage Model. Before scientists simulate changes in their neuronal network, they need to first create all the neurons and their connections within the virtual brain using the algorithm.

Here’s the rub: for any neuronal pair, the model stores all information about connectivity in each node that houses the receiving neuron—the postsynaptic neuron.

In other words, the presynaptic neuron, which sends out electrical impulses, is shouting into the void; the algorithm has to figure out where a particular message came from by solely looking at the receiver neuron and data stored within its node.

It sounds like a strange setup, but the model allows all the nodes to construct their particular portion of the neural network in parallel. This dramatically cuts down boot-up time, which is partly why the algorithm is so popular.

But as you probably guessed, it comes with severe problems in scaling. The sender node broadcasts its message to all receiver neuron nodes. This means that each receiver node needs to sort through every single message in the network—even ones meant for neurons housed in other nodes.

That means a huge portion of messages get thrown away in each node, because the addressee neuron isn’t present in that particular node. Imagine overworked post office staff skimming an entire country’s worth of mail to find the few that belong to their jurisdiction. Crazy inefficient, but that’s pretty much what goes on in the Memory-Usage Model.

The problem becomes worse as the size of the simulated neuronal networkgrows. Each node needs to dedicate memory storage space to an “address book” listing all its neural inhabitants and their connections. At the scale of billions of neurons, the “address book” becomes a huge memory hog.

Size Versus Source

The team hacked the problem by essentially adding a zip code to the algorithm.

Here’s how it works. The receiver nodes contain two blocks of information. The first is a database that stores data about all the sender neurons that connect to the nodes. Because synapses come in several sizes and types that differ in their memory consumption, this database further sorts its information based on the type of synapses formed by neurons in the node.

This setup already dramatically differs from its predecessor, in which connectivity data is sorted by the incoming neuronal source, not synapse type. Because of this, the node no longer has to maintain its “address book.”

“The size of the data structure is therefore independent of the total number of neurons in the network,” the authors explained.

The second chunk stores data about the actual connections between the receiver node and its senders. Similar to the first chunk, it organizes data by the type of synapse. Within each type of synapse, it then separates data by the source (the sender neuron).

In this way, the algorithm is far more specific than its predecessor: rather than storing all connection data in each node, the receiver nodes only store data relevant to the virtual neurons housed within.

The team also gave each sender neuron a target address book. During transmission the data is broken up into chunks, with each chunk containing a zip code of sorts directing it to the correct receiving nodes.

Rather than a computer-wide message blast, here the data is confined to the receiver neurons that they’re supposed to go to.

Speedy and Smart

The modifications panned out.

In a series of tests, the new algorithm performed much better than its predecessors in terms of scalability and speed. On the supercomputer JUQUEEN in Germany, the algorithm ran 55 percent faster than previous models on a random neural network, mainly thanks to its streamlined data transfer scheme.

At a network size of half a billion neurons, for example, simulating one second of biological events took about five minutes of JUQUEEN runtime using the new algorithm. Its predecessor clocked in at six times that.

This really “brings investigations of fundamental aspects of brain function, like plasticity and learning unfolding over minutes…within our reach,” said study author Dr. Markus Diesmann at the Jülich Research Centre.

As expected, several scalability tests revealed that the new algorithm is far more proficient at handling large networks, reducing the time it takes to process tens of thousands of data transfers by roughly threefold.

“The novel technology profits from sending only the relevant spikes to each process,” the authors concluded. Because computer memory is now uncoupled from the size of the network, the algorithm is poised to tackle brain-wide simulations, the authors said.

While revolutionary, the team notes that a lot more work remains to be done. For one, mapping the structure of actual neuronal networks onto the topology of computer nodes should further streamline data transfer. For another, brain simulation software needs to regularly save its process so that in case of a computer crash, the simulation doesn’t have to start over.

“Now the focus lies on accelerating simulations in the presence of various forms of network plasticity,” the authors concluded. With that solved, the digital human brain may finally be within reach.

Evan Mawarire is a civil rights activist, pastor, and leader of the #ThisFlag movement in Zimbabwe.

Mawarire first gained considerable attention on social media following a video he posted in April 2016 that expressed his frustration with the state of the nation and Robert Mugabe’s government. In the video he encourages peaceful protest and urges people to refuse to pay bribes and stand up for their rights. In July 2016, the #ThisFlag campaign resulted in a mass movement of Zimbabweans shutting down the capital in a series of protests against corruption, poverty, and abuse of office by the Mugabe regime. Mawarire was charged with inciting public violence and “attempting to overthrow the government.” The court later threw out the charges and released him. Mawarire played a leading role in the peaceful protests which brought down Robert Mugabe in December 2017.

(Joseph) Scott Schiller is the Global Head of Customer and Market Development for HP Inc.’s 3D Printing business unit. His position has accountability for vertical market development, strategic customer engagement as well as strategic partnerships and alliances across HP’s 3D printing initiatives.

Since joining the 3D printing organization in 2014, Scott served as Business Director for the launch of Multi Jet Fusion™. Prior to that he spent eight years as part of the team that built a new business in HP focused on mass customization solutions for high volume print manufacturing. This business continues today as HP’s PageWide Press division.

Prior to joining HP, Scott had a variety of entrepreneurial and product development roles with companies such as Honeywell International Inc., Microsoft Corp. as well as leading several smaller businesses in Seattle.

Scott holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and a master’s of business administration in Technology Marketing from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, Seattle.

As the Interim CEO of SqwidNet, Phathizwe Malinga will now also be responsible for building an IoT connectivity business in South Africa in partnership with International IoT giant Sigfox.

In addition to his new role, he will continue overlooking the development of the strategy and Connected Devices Solutions divisions for SqwidNet, a fully owned subsidiary of Dark Fibre Africa. The role of leading the SqwidNet comes naturally to Malinga as he has been in various leadership roles over the years.

He is no stranger to the role of a strategist, as he consulted with both Max Healthcare and Life Healthcare Group in his previous position with the organisation. He has been involved in the information technology and telecommunication industry for over two decades, having held senior management level positions.

Before joining SqwidNet, Malinga was the Head of Application Strategy at Life Healthcare Group, and he was in charge of the IT Application strategy and Software Development for the group. Phathizwe completed his Executive MBA from the Graduate School of Business, Cape Town and he is also a Guest Lecturer with the university as well.

Tanya Knowles is the Managing Executive of Fractal Solutions, a Division of Strate (Pty) Ltd. Fractal Solutions is tasks with the research and development of disruptive technologies, including blockchain / distributed ledger technology. Strate is South Africa’s authorised Central Securities Depository providing electronic settlement of securities concluded on various stock exchange in the country. Tanya is Chair of the South African Financial Markets Blockchain Consortium representing close to 50 of the country’s largest financial institutions. She is currently completing her certification in blockchain technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds a BA, PDM and MBA all from the University of the Witwatersrand. Having presented across four continents, Tanya is a well renowned speaker and thought leader in her area of expertise. In her private capacity, Tanya is involved in a number of women’s leadership and mentoring initiatives aimed at professional business women.

Known as the ‘Master of Influence’ by his clients, Gilan Gork is an internationally renowned Mentalist, Corporate Speaker, Trainer and Entertainer.

In 2016 Gilan founded the Influence Institute, where he and his team believe that everyone has ideas, products or services that deserve attention.

“We want to empower people with the ability to get the buy-in, agreement or support they need from others, so they can reach their highest success”, says Gilan.

Gilan has presented for Fortune500 companies in almost 30 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and America, and is the author of the bestselling book “Persuasion Games”. With two decades’ experience as a professional mentalist, Gilan creates unique learning experiences that help you unleash your influence.

He teaches how to apply a working knowledge of influence and persuasion to real-life practical situations, to be able to lead, sell, negotiate, market and inspire on a new level.

As part of Gilan’s distinctive presentation style, he interactively demonstrates a remarkable ability to decode and influence people’s thoughts. He demonstrates how through psychology you can rapidly increase your levels of trust, credibility and influence with others.

Want to work with Gilan and the Influence Institute? Drop us a mail at manager@gilangork.com.

For more information about Gilan and how he uses his experience as a Mentalist to help others learn how to positively influence outcomes visit www.gilangork.com.

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As a mentalist, I am passionate about using influence to not only entertain, but educate my clients on how they can unlock their potential and achieve their objectives faster and more effectively. The techniques I use are as accessible to anyone as the ability to breathe, all you need to do is learn how to apply them.

Nnamdi is passionate about the power of technology and innovation to change the lives of Africans. He is the International Remittance Lead for Standard Bank Group and the author of two books on African innovation -Disrupting Africa: The Rise and Rise of African InnovationandTaking On Silicon Valley: How Africa’s Innovators will change its future, both books showing how African technology and digital payments can propel Africa as a technology powerhouse on the global stage.

His many travels and business experience across the continent have greatly contributed to his huge optimism for Africa and its bright future. He features frequently as a presenter and chairperson across various conferences in Africa, contributes regularly to media houses on the subject of innovation

He has been named amongst the”100 most influential names in Africa’s telecoms, media and ICT industry”by the AfricaCom100 Research Board and more recently, been named as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People of African Descent”, a MIPAD initiative, as part of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent.

Monique Giggy runs SU Ventures where she works closely with impact-focused startups that are solving world problems with technology. She and her team create programs and provide key resources that truly accelerate breakthroughs through curated networking, experience based coaching and a solid focus on metrics.

She is a seasoned value creator with proven success building/exiting companies, driving turnarounds, and leading high performing global teams. Prior to SU she conceived and helped build the world’s most popular and successful mobile golf application- Swing by Swing Golf which she sold in 2014. After the sell of her company she participated in the 2014 Global Solutions Program where she fell in love with SU.

Monique has served as an advisor and entrepreneurship coach, Venture Partner, CMO, and has started and invested in several companies.

John Sanei (Sah-nay) is an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, best-selling author and global speaker who talks about the future with a unique twist. By combining human psychology, future studies and business strategy, he guides audiences and leaders into an exponentially different future with excitement and optimism.

In What’s Your Moonshot? (his first book) he inspires the reader to ask bigger, bolder and more courageous questions about the future. In MAGNETiiZE – his second book, he invites the reader to focus on elegant, conscious and deliberate questions about the future.

John is also proudly the first African faculty member of the prestigious Singularity University in San Francisco and The Duke Corporation.

Mic believes that the future will be abundant as the power and potential of exponential technologies increase and their price gradually drop to zero, ultimately democratising numerous industries and improving the lives of all.

As co-founder of Mann Made – an award-winning experiential brand agency that has worked with top global and local Fortune 500 companies – Mic Mann has 19 years of experience in the media, marketing and eventing industry. Mic is a prolific speaker and strategist on exponential technologies, the future of work and the changing role of professionals.

After completing the Singularity University Executive Programme in 2015, he realised that in order to #futureproofAfrica we need to embrace exponential technologies. He subsequently brought the SingularityU South Africa Summit – the first of its kind on the continent – to South Africa. Mic’s passions are entrepreneurship and break-through technologies. He is also involved in the local start-up and maker community.

During the founding of the Thiel Fellowship in 2010, Danielle Strachman joined to lead the design and operations. She is the visionary behind the Thiel Summit series that has been attended by around 2 000 young entrepreneurs. Previous to her work with Peter Thiel, Danielle founded and directed Innovations Academy in San Diego, a K-8 charter school serving 350 students, with a focus on student-led, project-based learning and other alternative programmes.

Danielle is passionate about disrupting education and has worked with home schoolers, co-founded the Innovations Academy and 1517 Fund. The latter supports young entrepreneurs and technology start-ups with grant, pre-seed, and seed funding. 1517 Fund understands that not everyone is suited for higher education, hence it focuses on makers, hackers and scientists, who are interested in working outside tracked institutions. It motivates people to work on their passions, learn by doing and create new technologies.

Nastassia Arendse is the host of the Classic Business Breakfast on Classic FM, which is South Africa’s first morning business show that focuses on breaking business news, expert analysis and investment insight.

Nastassia has been working in broadcasting for eight years and has worked in television and radio. As a television anchor, she presented Closing Bell East Africa and Open Exchange on CNBC Africa.

As an experienced reporter, she covered global commodity markets for Mineweb, where she wrote articles that track changes and trends worldwide in the commodity space. The beat focused on how prospects for the global economy, interest rates and currencies influence investor decisions in relation to gold, precious metals, fixed income and equities.

In 2015, she hosted a show called Africa’s visionaries for SkyTV, which aired in the United Kingdom. She has interviewed a range of business leaders, including Barclays CEO Maria Ramos, Bidvest founder Brian Joffe, Comair CEO Erik Venter and former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano among others.

Nastassia has a passion for technology and innovative. She represents a new breed of journalists that have managed to break the professional mould and explore different avenues in the media and public sphere.

As Deloitte Africa’s Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Valter Adão oversees Deloitte’s Digital and Innovation portfolios. He leads a diverse team of specialists, who create a leading digital ecosystem to assist organisations in understanding and undergoing Digital Transformation, whilst uplifting their digital experiences and becoming digital at the core, in order to remain viable and competitive in a world of ever-changing digital technologies.

Valter is a corporate entrepreneur with extensive experience in building new businesses across a variety of industries. He works mostly with blue-chip clients assisting them in re-imagining their businesses or identifying high value, innovative business opportunities and rapidly commercialising them into sustainable businesses.

Valter was previously the leader and founding director of Monitor Deloitte, following Deloitte’s acquisition of the Monitor group. He is also a member of Deloitte’s Global Innovation Executive Committee.

Alex Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation. He has also served as Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009. In his work, Alex has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers and artists to promote free and open societies. Alex’s writing and views on human rights and technology have appeared in media outlets across the world, including: The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, Fast Company, The Guardian, Monocle, NowThis, NPR, Quartz, TIME, WIRED, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal. He has spoken at universities ranging from MIT to Stanford, presented at the European Parliament and participated in Singularity University events from Berlin to Johannesburg. He has also spoken at a range of blockchain events about why bitcoin matters for freedom.

Adam Pantanowitz is a fanatical technologist, who was inspired to learn by growing up in the age of the world wide web. Since studying biomedical and electrical engineering, he has worked in the field of biotech and software. Adam is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and is chartered internationally as an engineer. He is part of the first group of faculty for Singularity University South Africa, with a focus on biotechnology.

Adam has lectured Engineering and Medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand since 2009. In academia, Adam’s innovations have resulted in a number of patents, academic papers and the creation of the media interest piece “Brainternet”, with its world-first, portable brain-internet livestream. Some of his other projects, on which he has worked alongside colleagues, include an eye-controlled wheelchair, a non-cognitive brain transmission channel that uses light and a thought-controlled robotic arm with a light-to-brain on/off switch. Their other innovations include a hands-free controlled surgery interaction system, a CPR monitoring system, a computer-based sign language interpreter and an innovative eye-controlled cursor.

He enjoys solving seemingly unsolvable problems and co-founded businesses AURA, Tariffic, Lawbuntu, among others. He also acted as CTO of VATIT, the world’s largest VAT reclaim business from 2015 until 2017.

Adam speaks around the world on the future of technology with a focus on tech-human convergence and also does motivational speaking.

Dr Taddy Blecher is CEO of the Maharishi Institute and the Imvula Empowerment Trust, CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association and former Chairperson of the South African National Government task team on entrepreneurship, education and job creation. He is a pioneer of the free tertiary education movement in South Africa and has helped establish six free-access institutions of higher learning.

Taddy co-founded the Branson School of Entrepreneurship with Sir Richard Branson and has raised over R500 million in cash, property and equity to support free access to post-secondary school education. As a result, over 17 000 unemployed South Africans have been educated, found employment and transitioned from living in poverty to the middle class. These formerly unemployed youth now have combined salaries in excess of R1 billion per annum and expected lifetime earnings of R27.2 billion. Over 600 000 young school-going South Africans have been reached with his one-week education and life-skills training courses.

Taddy was chosen as one of 21 Icons in South Africa, is a 2002 World Economic Forum “Global Leader of Tomorrow”​ award recipient, a 2005 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader of the World”, a Skoll Global Social Entrepreneur, who has won a $1 million prize for his work and has been honoured with two honorary doctorates. In 2009, author Tom Peters named Taddy one of his top five most influential entrepreneurs in the world over the last 30 years. Over 50 published books have profiled his work, including three recent books by Sir Richard Branson.

As a qualified actuary and management consultant, Taddy is passionate about the approach of Consciousness-Based Education, a system of education that develops the full potential of each student. This has led the Maharishi Institute to win the first prize in a global competition to find the most promising and innovative education initiative in the world.

Richard Browning is the Founder of the pioneering aeronautical innovation company called Gravity. Since its launch in March 2017, Gravity has invented, built and patented an Iron Man like flight system.

The dream was to reimagine an entirely new form of authentic human flight that leans on an elegant collaboration of the mind and body that is augmented by cutting-edge technology. Gravity has to date been experienced by over a billion people globally with video views running at more than 60 million within the first week of launch. In the first year Gravity executed 46 flight events across 16 countries including at four TED talks.

Richard and his team are delivering on the vision to build Gravity into a world-class aeronautical engineering business, that can challenge perceived boundaries in human aviation, and inspire a generation to dare ask ‘what if?’.

As Director of International Summits, Bohdanna Kesala’s work is to bring influencers together to cross-pollinate regional, national and global ideas that will grow into tech and social change for the betterment of all.

After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington, Bohdanna worked at Northwestern University as their Special Events Coordinator. There she met and worked with politicians, Supreme Court justices and the brightest academic minds, while witnessing the power of knowledge and change.

From there, she moved to San Francisco and received a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting from California College of Arts and an MFA in Painting from San Francisco State University. For the next decade Bohdanna concentrated on her art career. She exhibited her work in the United States and Europe, while also teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. Bohdanna’s paintings focused on beauty and history and how they can bring people together visually.

Merging her creativity and passion to bring people together in collaboration, Bohdanna began working for The Thiel Foundation as their Event Curator, managing all aspects of their events from high-level design to curating speakers and building partnerships between other organisations. Some highlights include: managing all events for CNBC Transforming Tomorrow: a documentary focused on the Thiel Fellowship, working with Wired.com to produce events for ‘Teen Technorati’, a web series on The Thiel Fellowship, and producing events for Breakout Labs Unboxing: a showcase of BOL’s grantees. Bohdanna was also one of the architects of The Thiel Foundation Summit, a bi-annual assembly of young entrepreneurs and visionaries from around the world.

Working directly with entrepreneurs inspired Bohdanna to open 10 Forward Events, a full-service, event-curation firm specialising in producing innovative and one-of-a-kind events for the science and tech industry, start-ups, entrepreneurs and VC firms. This endeavour ultimately brought her to Singularity University.

Rob Nail is the CEO and Associate founder of Singularity University. He brings a unique entrepreneurial and globally-focused approach to growing a non-traditional university as a platform to create a future of abundance, where exponential technologies empower us to solve global grand challenges.

Prior to Singularity University, he co-founded Velocity11 in 1999, which built automation equipment and robotics for cancer research and pharmaceutical development. After being acquired by Agilent Technologies in 2007, he traded the role of CEO to become General Manager in an attempt to be a catalyst for change at a big company. He gave that up in 2009 to go surfing and eventually find his true calling and biggest challenge yet with Singularity University. He is a director at Harman (HAR) and Light&Motion, as well as a co-founder and Director of Alite Designs. Rob is an active angel investor and advisor. He holds degrees in Mechanical, Materials Science and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of California, Davis and Stanford University.

Jeffrey Rogers is a facilitator, speaker and programme designer, who creates interactive educational experiences driven by storytelling, engagement and play. He’s an academically trained social scientist (University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas-Austin) with a knack for future-thinking and a deep belief in the transformative potential of exponential technologies as tools to de-risk experimentation, accelerate learning and create change.

Jeffrey speaks frequently across the world on exponential thinking and leads workshops on creative problem-solving and storytelling. He’s connected dots, ideas and people as a moderator recently for the Singularity University Executive Programme and Exponential Tech and Strategy programmes for Oracle, Google, Roche, NBC, Aegon among other global brands.

Prior to joining Singularity University, Jeffrey spent a decade building learning and development solutions across sectors and designing and delivering award-winning educational and training programmes. He currently serves as Singularity University’s Director of Faculty and Facilitator Development. Jeffrey works closely with the faculty to help individuals discover their unique strengths as communicators and teachers, and to co-create rave-worthy, learner-centred experiences online and at Singularity University.

As co-founder and CEO of Mann Made – an award-winning, experiential brand agency for top local and global Fortune 500 companies – Shayne Mann has 17 years’ of experience in the media, marketing and eventing industries. Over the decades he has successfully driven Mann Made to become a 65-employee strong company that specialises in activations, events, media products and productions, as well as mobile and telecoms.

Shayne is a SingularityU alumnus and was also the co-CEO of SingularityU South Africa. He epitomises exponential leadership and is passionate about how exponential and disruptive technologies can drive change to positively impact South Africa and the continent.

Shayne is passionate about the drivers of entrepreneurship and is involved in the local start-up and maker communities. He has partnered with the Maharishi University of Management, Taddy Blecher and The Ubuntu Foundation. In partnership with an international private equity investor, he has invested in a variety of industries including property, medicine, music, media, and tech, alongside his brother Mic. His personal passions include cycling, meditation and leading a healthy lifestyle and creating a positive impact in the country through all he does.

Nathana O’Brien Sharma is the Program Director for Faculty Affairs at Singularity University. She’s also faculty in Law, Policy, Ethics and Blockchain, where she writes and speaks on the impact of accelerating technologies and the future of law and governance to audiences of technologists and business leaders. Nathana is a principal at Crypto-Lotus, a cryptocurrency hedge fund and is an Advisory Board Member for the Creative Destruction Labs in Toronto, the leading academic startup accelerator in North America which supports companies in specialized technology tracks including machine learning and quantum machine learning.

Nathana is an International Association of Privacy Professionals certified privacy expert in both the US and the EU and advises companies on navigating complex cross-border privacy issues, particularly in connection with the use of emerging technologies. Nathana was previously a technology transactions associate at Gunderson Dettmer, where she advised high growth VC backed startups and venture funds on a range of technology and business issues. Nathana is a JD/MBA graduate of the Yale Law School and Yale School of Management.

Nathana was a lead researcher at MetaMed, a VC backed medical research start up and has a background in the lab in immunology and neuroscience. She is also a graduate of Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program.

Anita is the CEO and Co-Founder of Iris.ai; one of the 10 most innovative artificial intelligence startups in 2017 according to Fast Company. Iris.ai is an AI Science assistant, able to read, digest and connect scientific knowledge, that will grow up to be the world’s first AI Researcher within a decade.

Set out to democratize access to science, Iris.ai can reduce R&D departments’ time to map out existing research by 95% and remove current requirements of having deep domain expertise involved in the process, thus allowing more people to solve more difficult problems.

Anita is a highly sought after public speaker, one of Inspiring Fifty Nordic’s most inspiring women in tech, twice TEDx speaker and 500 startups, SU Global Grand Challenges Awards and TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield alumni. Anita is also the first Norwegian to attend Singularity University’s Global Solution Program in 2015 – and she put on the first Global Impact Challenge Norway in 2016.

Anita has never had what she refers to as “a real job” and Iris.ai is her fourth own startup. The past 10 years of her career have spanned over 9 industries including developing an e-learning tool in Silicon Valley, performing theatre for babies, reducing energy consumption in the process industry through heat exchanger network optimization, getting 30 (mainly middle-age, male) engineers to dance to ABBA in front of their co-workers, facilitating solar light business creation in Kenya, being in the centre of several startups crashing and burning, organizing entrepreneurial conferences and trying to disrupt the recruitment industry. She also dropped by 6 universities on the way. And built a race car.

Dr Geci Karuri-Sebina has been Executive Manager at South African Cities Network since 2011. She previously worked with National Treasury, the CSIR, HSRC, and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Advanced Policy Institute. Dr. Geci holds Masters degrees in Urban Planning and Architecture from UCLA, and a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand.

Her interests span a range of development foresight, policy, planning and practice topics, particularly relating to urban governance, the built environment and innovation systems. She has two decades’ experience working and publishing in these fields. She recently published the book Innovation Africa (Emerald Books, 2016).

Dr. Geci is a Council Member on the South African Council of Planners, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand School of Governance, and an Research Associate of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation (IERI) and the National Research Foundation’s South African Research Chairon Innovation and Development.

She is also a founding director of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project, co-founder of ForesightForDevelopment.org, an Associate Editor for the African Journal for Science, Technology, Innovation and Development (Taylor & Francis), and Africa Regional Editor forForesight: The journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy (Emerald).

Fred Swaniker is deeply passionate about Africa and believes that the key missing ingredient on the continent is good leadership. This belief led him to launch the African Leadership Group, which aims to groom 3 million leaders for Africa by 2035. Prior to launching his entrepreneurial pursuits, Swaniker worked at McKinsey & Company in South Africa.

Swaniker has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and was listed by Forbes Magazine among the top ten young ‘power men’ in Africa. Fred has an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top 10% of each graduating class. He holds a BA in Economics with a minor in Mathematical Statistics from Macalester College (magna cum laude). He was born in Ghana but has lived and worked in about 10 different African countries.

Jamie Wheal is an expert on peak performance and leadership, specializing in the neuroscience and application of Flow states. He has advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command, the athletes of RedBull, and the owners of NFL, NBA, MLB and Premier League teams, to the executives of Google, Deloitte Cisco and Young Presidents’ Organization. He studied historical anthropology under MacArthur Fellow Patricia Nelson Limerick, specializing in utopian social movements and his work has appeared in anthologies and peer-reviewed academic journals.

Wheal co-authored Stealing Fire; a provocative examination of what’s actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.

Jamie Wheal is Partner at Fulcrum Advisors and Executive Directive of Flow Genome Project, an international trans-disciplinary organization dedicated to reverse-engineering the genome of Flow, or the peak performance state, by 2020.

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist, futurist, and award-winning author. Ramez spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams developing early versions of Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and the Bing search engine. His career has focused on bringing advanced collaboration, communication, and information retrieval capabilities to roughly one billion people around the world, and took him to the role of Partner and Director of Program Management within Microsoft, with deep experience leading teams working on cutting edge technologies such as machine learning, search, massive scale services, and artificial intelligence.

Between stints at Microsoft, Ramez founded and ran Apex NanoTechnologies, the world first company devoted entirely to software tools to accelerate molecular design. He holds 19 patents related to search engines, information retrieval, web browsing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Ramez is also the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of four books: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (non-fiction), which looks at the environmental and natural resource challenges of climate change, energy, water, and food, and charts a course to meet those challenges by investing in the scientific and technological innovation needed to overcome them, and by changing our policies to encourage both conservation and critical innovations.

He’s a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy at Aurora Illinois. In his leisure, Ramez has climbed mountains, descended into icy crevasses, chased sharks through their native domain, backpacked through remote corners of China, and ridden his bicycle down hundreds of miles of the Vietnam coast. He lives in Seattle, where he writes and speaks full time.

Nathaniel Calhoun helps guide Singularity University’s approach to changemaking and impact as a founding member and Vice Chair of its Global Grand Challenge Faculty. He has moderated numerous SU Executive Programs and Directed SU’s flagship impact program, the Global Solutions Program (GSP).

Nathaniel closely tracks innovations in emerging decentralized and platform cooperative technologies that create brand new business models and opportunities. He tracks disruptive and precedent setting changes within policy, especially related to governance and civic technologies. He specializes in helping both private and public sector actors to understand how to leverage and prepare for the growth of these and related trends, offering a unique take on the options facing an aspiring “exponential organization.”

Nathaniel also supervises the creation and implementation of digital technologies at a global scale that help alleviate poverty while increasing business literacy along with digital and financial services in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia. He does this work through CODE Innovation, a consulting company he founded in 2009 to help organizations like UNICEF and Plan International to use web and mobile technologies more effectively. Code Innovation has received financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to further develop their Self Help Group digital platform, which is growing exponentially in nine languages and more than a dozen countries.

Nathaniel has two decades of experience in the field of education, public speaking, moderation and resilience building. He tracks the threat of technological unemployment and the relative merits of the solutions that humanity is offering around this issue. After living and working in Africa for more than a decade, Nathaniel enjoys helping organizations to think through their strategies with new and emerging markets.

Nathaniel is available for a variety of customized speaking and consulting packages. A sampling of keynote presentations is described below. Talks below can be given in 30, 45, 60, 75 and 90 minute varieties. Prices vary depending on industry, location, duration and special requests.

Professor Mark Post first got involved in a Dutch government-funded programme investigating “in vitro meat” in 2008, when he was a professor of tissue engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The programme had been initiated by Wilem van Eelen, an 86-year-old entrepreneur who held a long-time fascination for the possibility of culturing meat.When the director of the programme fell ill, about mid-way through the programme, Post took over supervision of the PhD students. Motivated by the potentially high societal impact, he continued research even after the funding had ended in 2010.

Renewed funding by a private partner enabled the realisation of a project to create a processed meat product using muscle cells from a cow.Professor Post received his medical degree from the University of Utrecht in 1982 and trained for a PhD in Pulmonary Pharmacology, graduating from the University of Utrecht in 1989.He joined the KNAW Interuniversity Cardiology Institute of the Netherlands before being appointed full-time Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA in 1996. Five years later, he moved with his lab to Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, and was appointed Associate Professor of Medicine and of Physiology.

In July 2002, Dr. Post returned to the Netherlands as a Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Technical University Eindhoven. Since January 2004 he has been Chair of Physiology at Maastricht University.

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Jody is the Director of Design for SU Labs, where she provides design and innovation direction for corporate, startup and field impact teams. She employs a radical approach to Human Centered Design to create exponential solutions to the world’s toughest problems. She also speaks about Augmented and Virtual Reality for SU.

In her 23-year design career, Jody has created just about everything from holograms to physical products and R&D. Today, she is Director of Design for Singularity University Labs, where she incubates solutions to Global Grand Challenges using exponential technologies. She specializes in the avant garde of technology, covering everything from Artificial Intelligence to Robotics. She’s spent the last 9 years on AR/VR, most notably as Principal Experience Designer on the HoloLens Project at Microsoft and Principal UX at LEAP Motion. She has traveled the world, speaking about the future of these technologies and their impact on the world for groups like WIRED, Google, and TEDx. Previously, she co-founded and directed Kicker Studio, a design consultancy specializing in Natural User Interface, Perceptual Computing, and R&D for companies including Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, and DARPA.

Jody is also a practicing artist with an MFA in Painting and Design & Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute. She’s a collaborator with the art crew Five Ton Crane, and in her spare time, makes her own clothes while building robots and rockets.

Jason co-founded Made In Space in 2010 as a result of analyzing the best possible approaches to enabling a fully sustainable form of space colonization.

With a core focus on space manufacturing, the company has since built, flown, and operated the first and second 3D printers in space. Installed on the International Space Station (ISS), the first Made In Space Zero Gravity 3D printer began space manufacturing in November 2014. Today, Made In Space operates the second generation 3D printer on the ISS, called the Additive Manufacturing Facility, enabling groups across the planet to have hardware manufactured in space.

Additionally, Made In Space is working with NASA in the development of the Archinaut program to enable in space robotic manufacturing and assembly of large space structures. In 2016, Made In Space announced the first space mission to manufacture goods in space for use on Earth; an exotic optical fiber expected to have 100 times lower attenuation than traditional silica fiber when produced in the weightlessness of space.

Jason holds a B.S. and M.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Central Florida, has studied at the Singularity University Graduate Summer Program, and is an internationally recognized speaker on the topics of space exploration, advanced manufacturing, and the theory of disruption.

He serves on the University of Central Florida College of Engineering and Computer Science Dean’s Advisory Board, the Advisory Council to the Waypaver Foundation, the Technical Advisory Board for Space For Humanity, and on the Board of Directors for the Future Space Leaders Foundation. In 2014, Forbes recognized Jason on the prestigious 30 under 30 list.

Stacey Ferreira is an Arizona native who co-founded her first company, a single sign on company called MySocialCloud, when she graduated from high school. She attracted investors like Sir Richard Branson, Jerry Murdock and Alex Welch through Twitter who invested $1.2M in the business when she was just 18 years old.

In 2013, Stacey sold MySocialCloud.com to Reputation.com and went on to publish her first best-selling book called 2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials Are Breaking Down Age Barriers & Changing the World.

Stacey is currently the CEO of Forge, an enterprise workforce management software that empowers hourly employees to work on-demand while providing retailers the tools needed to source, hire, manage and retain their workforces.

In addition to her entrepreneurial work, Ferreira was selected as one of twenty Thiel Fellows selected for the 2015 Thiel Fellowship and is a US State Department Speaker who has given speeches about entrepreneurship in Russia, Egypt, Cameroon and the Central African Republic to name a few.

John Hagel III has nearly 35 years of experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, and has helped companies improve their performance by effectively applying new generations of technology to reshape business strategies. John currently serves as co-chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, which conducts original research into emerging business opportunities that should be on the CEO agenda. In recent years, the Center for the Edge has established branches in Melbourne, Australia and in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and author. Prior to that, he held significant positions at leading consulting firms and companies. From 1984 to 2000, he was a principal at McKinsey & Co., where he was a leader of the Strategy Practice. In addition, he founded and led McKinsey Electronic Commerce Practice from 1993 to 2000. John has also served as senior vice president of strategic planning at Atari, Inc., and earlier in his career, worked at Boston Consulting Group.

He is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. John is the author of a series of best-selling business books, including his most recent book, The Power of Pull and, earlier, The Only Sustainable Edge, Out of the Box, Net Worth and Net Gain. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and professional service firms.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging.

He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively.

His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the characterization of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage.

He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies longevity escape velocity.

Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

Tiffany Vora is an educator, writer, research scientist, and entrepreneur who is excited to bring her diversity of experience to Singularity University as Principal Faculty in Medicine and Digital Biology.

After earning undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemistry at New York University, Tiffany worked on cutting-edge drug-discovery technologies at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Her PhD research in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, which was funded through NASA, brought her into the emerging fields of genomics, systems biology, and computational biology. It was during this time that Tiffany developed an interest in the cultural shifts that accompany new technologies and new ways of thinking. She translated this interest into a global perspective by joining the American University of Cairo as a Visiting Assistant Professor, where she spearheaded curriculum development for core classes in scientific thinking as well as computational biology classes for non-programmers.

Upon her return to the United States, Tiffany founded Bayana Science, an editing, writing, and consulting company dedicated to excellence in science communication. Tiffany also served as an instructor for the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She has contributed to literally thousands of grant proposals, research articles, presentations, textbooks, and other works spanning medicine, computer science, applied physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, and the life sciences; her biology expertise encompasses fields as diverse as the microbiome, ancient molecules, biophysics, environmental monitoring, tissue engineering, biohacking, and the quantitative analysis of large biological datasets.

Tiffany loves encountering the natural world through hiking and scuba diving. She travels extensively with her family, seeking out new experiences and cultures. She enjoys sharing her passions through teaching, writing, and public speaking.

David Roberts is regarded as one of the world top experts on disruptive innovation and exponentially advancing technology. His passion is to help transform the lives of a billion suffering people in the world through disruptive innovation.

David served as Vice President of Singularity University and two-time Director (and alum) of the Graduate Studies Program. He is an award winning CEO and serial entrepreneur, and has started ventures backed with over $100 million of investment from Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, Cisco, Oracle, Accenture, In-Q-Tel, and others.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and medals and has led the development of some of the most complex, state-of-the art systems ever built, to include satellites, drones, and fusion centers. He also worked as an Investment Banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Goldman Sachs Headquarters. He received his B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from M.I.T. was a Distinguished Graduate, and majored in Artificial Intelligence and Bio-Computer Engineering. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

David is Chairman at HaloDrop, a revolutionary global drone services company, Chairman at 1QBit the world first software company for quantum computers, and is a formal adviser to Made-In Space, responsible for manufacturing the first object in Space with a 3D printer on the Space Station.

Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley Business schools have all written and taught case studies on David leadership, management, and decision making. He has been featured on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, and in USA Today, Fortune Magazine, The New York Times, Business Week, CNN, and dozens of others. His startups have received many awards to include Internet World Net Rising Stars,Red Herring Catch, top 50 Private Companies in the World, Red Herring Top100 Private Companies in the World, USA Today Tech Reviews Best Picks, Internet Outlook Investors Choice Award, Enterprise Outlook Investors Choice, Best of the Web from PC World, and Apple Computer Premier Systems Integrator Award.

His fascination with technology began In fourth grade after building a hovering electric drone, to carry his younger sister to the bus stop, powered by what was formerly his mother’s vacuum cleaner, and fortunately limited by the length of an electric power cord.